Tuesday, December 14, 2010

The back drive

My college has long driveways leading up from the main and back gates to the main porch. There are these short elevated stone platforms lining the entire stretch of the two drives for students to sit on. These drives, as they have come to be called, are arguably the backdrop of nearly everyone’s most enduring memories of their time in college. I do believe that these drives made all the difference in giving my college the kind of personality that came to be associated with it. The back drive in particular was the zone of simply letting go. It is shadier than the front drive because of the older, bigger trees there and it used to get filled up quickly with people during any kind of leisure break or unpopular classes.

My best memories of college are sitting on that drive and having the most engrossing conversations with my best friend, or sometimes just watching the world go by with a book in our hands. We were a part of a bigger group of friends and it was common for us all to sit out a few hours of the day on that drive. We were also always within earshot of the other groups of people around us and we would often see someone from somewhere else laugh out loud at something funny one of us had said, leaving the funny person feeling terribly pleased about her comic skills or hear someone else continue a song one of us had started to hum. I remember this one day when one of the many stray dogs that our college had adopted had a long loud sneezing bout in the middle of the drive. Everyone on the drive had gone completely quiet to watch him and cheered for him once he stopped. He sheepishly ran away from our sight, not knowing how to receive the sudden attention. I remember being able to sit back on that drive and letting go of all the small big worries that came when graduation started seeming more like a tangible reality than a distant hurdle and being able to slowly accept circumstances at one severe low point in my life. Most of all, I remember all of us being completely at ease with and totally unapologetic for the people we were and having a lot of fun together, perhaps much more than some of the others we knew. Some of the sweatshirts of our college had “God is a woman” written on them and that probably defines the highly charged air we breathed within the college walls.

Today, with a few years of Real Life having happened to me, I realize just how important that experience was. My friends from college are still some of the nicest, most motivated, interesting and happy people I know. It is hard to imagine that somewhere during all those hours spent giggling and discussing the most trivial of issues, we grew up emotionally. In the spirit of the person I was back then, I will not apologise for being judgmental now and admit that I now know of so many people who did not get that kind of growing experience for whatever reason that might have been and are now adults who have just not grown up, and that is not in an endearing “keeping the inner child alive” kind of way but are characterized with being annoying, stubborn and unable of processing new thoughts.
When I go to my college to teach every Saturday these days, I can still sense the unbridled energy and draw heavily from it to keep me going through some of the occasional difficult days the rest of the week. All of this is probably also a lengthy justification to myself on why sometimes I am such a wimp and think “Ah good, she’s found a friend” and choose to not say anything rather than point out that the class is being disturbed when that quiet girl in the corner talks to her friend with a wide grin on her face.

1 comment:

ofternoons-n-coffeespoons said...

:D lovely post padma! I just had a flash of Madonna making me stand up and read the chapter just to shut us up :)